During the spring and summer of 2024, seven Black and Brown queer artists from a variety of disciplines came together to explore the history, present, and future of Black queer art-making spaces in Chicago. In hearing from and connecting with those who’ve had a hand in supporting and creating these spaces, the artists have fostered a vibrant community and embraced the imperative of how dreaming can help sustain artistic vision and empower persistence.
The series culminates in opportunities to turn outward, expanding the community of Black and Brown queer Chicago artists through the intentional transformation of the Green Line Performing Arts Center into a queer, artist-led gathering space. The cohort will create their Dream House, activating the space in ways to create a multi-sensory experience of Black and Brown queer joy, rest, and rejuvenation.
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Never So Free
2024 Artists
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Offerings
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley writes, “Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a new way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.”
This is no easy feat in a culture that purposefully limits imagination. To move into a new way of seeing and a different way of feeling, we must first confront the Dream Thief.
-Kemi Alabi
Drawing from the exploration of lost, current, and liminal spaces paired with the spaces we have and create for dreaming, the three offerings of the Never So Free: Black Queer Art + Assembly artist series delve deeper into the dream space, exploring the different perspectives of and energies that encompass dreaming. The series invites intentional community building and expansion to emphasize the political imperative of dreaming and imagination to our collective liberation, especially during this fraught political and cultural moment.
October 24: Dream Soirée
An intimate dinner party and creative activation, where elements of West African ritual practice will guide our community through care and intentional offerings. What’s the artist’s role in this political moment? As fear takes hold, how do we recommit to care, connection, and dreaming without limit? Join us for our Dream Soirée, a space to reclaim our radical imaginations. Harness the power of word and movement play with Kemi Alabi and Benji Hart, then set intentions with a dinner ritual led by Alexandra Antoine
November 14: Club Dream
A high vibe night of movement and sound to free your mind and let your body follow, Club Dream is a space to embody our radical imaginations. Find liberation through experimentation with movement and style, with offerings by photographer Natasha Moustache, DJ Duane Powell, vogue instructor Fabulous Freddie, and drag guide Po ’Chop.
December 6: The Dream House
A public exhibition where the artists will transform the Green Line Performing Arts Center into a multi-sensory dream experience.
Background
In 1987, Wholesome Roc Gallery opened in Chicago as an alternative art space organized with and for Chicago’s queer Black artists, among them Simone Bouyer, Robert Ford and Frankie Knuckles. Along with Washington DC’s Enikalley Coffeehouse, home to artists Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill, queer-centered spaces around the country launched a cultural movement by dedicating space for Black LGBTQ+ artists. Unfortunately, most of these small spaces closed in the 90s as the neighborhoods became less affordable. Today, Black queer space-makers in Chicago (i.e., House of the Lorde, AfroDisco Social Hour, froSkate, ) have carved out temporary places and intermittent pop-up scenes.
Last summer, APL collaborated with Sisters in Cinema and Party Noire to present Fierceness Served: Creating Black Queer Cultural Space, an evening of film, conversation, and social activation. The standing-room-only crowd joined in a lively conversation with six cultural leaders representing queer Black space-makers from the 1980s to today. Never So Free expands on the insights, themes and format of Fierceness Served.
Beginning in the spring of 2024, a cohort of queer Black artists from various disciplines gathered to establish community and creative connection, to meet with guest artists, archivists and place-makers drawn from Chicago’s queer Black creative communities, and to visit sites of significance within Chicago’s queer Black art making landscapes. In the fall, they collaborated a series of offerings that broaden the invitation to join a multi-generational conversation among queer Black and brown artists, their communities and their histories, to explore the rich history of queer Black space making in Chicago, and to affirm the significance of dedicated creative space for collaborative art making.
Throughout the year, APL’s Green Line Performing Arts Center served as a sustained space for queer Black artists to gather and develop their community and craft. Never So Free serves as a pilot for an ongoing effort to offer GLPAC as a site of assembly and creativity for a new generation of queer Black artists seeking a supportive place to make work.
Guest Artists and Partners
Salon 2: Current Spaces
Sisters in Cinema | Yvonne Welbon and Samira Abderahman
Black Alphabet | Adam L. McMath and Joshua X. Miller
froSkate | L Brew
AfroDisco Social Hour | Nnaemeka Ekwelum
Greystone Collective | Clemenstien Love
Salon 3: Liminal Spaces
Intention Setting | Faylita Hicks
Open Television (OTV) | Chris Walker and Sarah Minnie
House of the Lorde | Tiff Beatty and Jenn Freeman
NSF Orientation
Intention Setting | Samantha Jo
Literary Exchange | Donna Rose
EMERGENCE: Intersections at the Center, South Side Community Art Center | LaMar Gayles
Salon 1: Lost Spaces
Intention Setting | Rhonda Wheatley
AMFM | Ciera McKissick
Queer History of the Warehouse | Duane Powell
Wholesome Roc | [Media Burn and Stephanie Coleman video ]
For details, contact the Never So Free Team at isisf@uchicago.edu
Never So Free: Black Queer Art + Assembly is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Arts + Public Life is honored to be a part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.